(Winner of a 2008 James Beard Award for Best Food Writing and a Book Sense Book of the Year) In a memoir full of her renowned candor and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver tells how she and her family abandoned their beloved Southwest to move back to an Appalachian farm she inherited, in order to live only on food that they or their neighbors grew. The book makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

"Despite their genuine love of life in the Southwest, the Kingsolver family moved back to reconnect with ancestral roots in Appalachia, to a farm that has been in the author's family for years. There they have at least some chance of re-creating a profounder and more intimate relationship with the foods they put on the table.... Starting with spring's first asparagus, summer's chickens, and the fall's surfeit of vegetables, Kingsolver's family consumes what they and their farming neighbors produce. Writing with her usual sharp eye for irony, she urges readers to follow her example and reconnect with their food's source."—Booklist